Customer Reviews

Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution

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This enormous book (well over 700 large pages) tells the story of the origins of geology in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The term "geology" gets invented, by de Luc, about halfway through. The main theme of the book is that the development of the field was complex and personal, not a conflict between emerging "science" and sourly reactionary "religion." In fact, some of the main contributors, including de Luc, were highly religious, to the point of seeking geological proof of Noah's flood. Rudwick repeats on every possible occasion that religion was not a fundamentalist reactionary force. (The message certainly is needed, but this and many, many other repetitions of points get slightly wearisome.)
So why am I, an anthropologist specializing in traditional uses of plants and animals, reading a geology book? Basically, because this is one of the best books I've ever seen on how people develop concepts of the natural world. It shows how people thrashed around, made false starts, mixed brilliant insights with sad errors, slowly came to imagine the unimaginable, argued over silly points. Rudwick avoids like the plague, and routinely denounces and disproves, the simplistic history-of-science fairy tales we all know too well: the Lone Genius, the Evil Opponents, the Triumph of Truth, the Superiority of My Country's Science Over Yours, and so on. Geology developed more slowly and with more false starts than many sciences, and many people had a hand in it; none had a monopoly on right answers or on wrong ones.
Much of Rudwick's narrative has the fascination of a mystery novel. Slowly building throughout the book, for example, is the recognition of geological evidence that something unimaginably strange happened to Europe not long ago. The geologically sophisticated reader will know that it was the Ice Age--those vast successive glaciations. The geologists of the early 19th century simply could not imagine that. They were more and more mystified by evidence of a vast "catastrophe" unlike anything ever seen in history, but they were unable to conceive of the appalling reality. Rudwick promises a second huge volume; hopefully it will get us to the arguments over vast glaciations.
I don't know how geologists or historians of science will see this book, but I do know that any anthropologist, psychologist or phenomenological philosopher interested in how people think about time, rocks, and the natural world should give it a look.

These two books are a magisterial reconstruction of the emergence of modern geology in the late 18th and early 19th century. Rudwick concentrates on geology as geohistory, the effort to reconstruct the history of the earth and with it, the history of life. Rudwick begins in the last quarter of the 18th century with a concise but revealing survey of the basic institutional structure of 18th century science, the international Republic of Letters constituted by the multinational network of scholarly savants (to avoid anachronism, Rudwick uses this contemporary term throughout both books) interested in the earth and other sciences. This followed by a survey of the 4 major components of the 18th century earth sciences; mineralogy, physical geography, geognosy, and earth physics. The first 3 were essentially descriptive disciples. Mineralogy was an effort to describe objects, including both minerals in the modern sense, rocks, and fossils, obtained from the earth. It was essentially an office activity. Physical geography, clearly related to cartography was the description of major topographical features. Geognosy, which came primarily from the mining communities of central Europe was description of 3 dimenstional structure of rock masses. Earth physics was the effort to understand the causal mechanisms driving the structure of the earth. Emerging from it was geotheory, not something like modern geophysics but rather a series of efforts to derive models of the development of the earth from first principles in the way that Newton derived the structure of the solar system.

Against this background, Rudwick lays out a narrative of how pioneering savants developed the basic geohistory we now accept as the basis of modern geology. In Bursting the Limits... Rudwick lays out the story from verge of the French Revolution to the 1820s. In Worlds before Adam, he continues the story up to the 1840s. This is very much a story of intellectual cross-fertilization, both interdisciplinary and international. The melding of the different prior disciplines of the earth sciences and the work of savants in different nations contributes greatly to a novel synthesis. Rudwick traces the overlapping work of a series of gifted scientists who contributed to the genesis of geohistory. Among the major themes he follows are the emergence and increasing sophistication of paleontology as both a discipline and a tool for stratigraphy, the development of stratigraphy, the increasing appreciation of understanding contemporary processes to a causal understanding of past events, increasing precision of historical reconstruction, the careful use of local and regional studies, and the importance of melding museum work such as analysis of fossil remnants with careful fieldwork.

Major figures such Cuvier and Lyell figure prominently in these volumes but Rudwick describes a large number of only slightly lesser figures who contributed to development of modern geology. Frenchmen, Britons, Italians, German, Swiss, Russians, and others all figure in this narrative. Rudwick is particularly good on how some larger intellectual currents contributed to the emergence of geohistory. Rudwick emphasizes that the contingent nature of historical reconstruction comes into the earth sciences not from science per se but from other important intellectual traditions in textual criticism, the writing of history, and the relatively primitive archaeology of the 18th and 19th century. Another major contributor to the sense of contingent history crucial for establishing geohistory was Christianity. Rudwick takes pains to rebut the primitive notion of conflicts between emerging geohistory and religion. Not only were many of the major participants religious but the Christian emphasis on historical progression and the contingent nature of historical change due to the possiblity of divine intervention was a powerful spur to the idea of a contingent history of the earth. Rudwick shows also how the community of earth scientists moved increasingly from the abstract theorizing of geotheory to pursuit of much more concretely and narrowly defined research objectives. This happened both explicitly in the case of some workers, notably Cuvier, but also implicitly in the work of many others. Rudwick shows beautifully how theory, hypothesis, and new data generated from the increasing number of careful field studies interacted in fruitful ways.

Rudwick's account will feel remarkably familiar to scientist readers. An international community of scholars communicating through well established journals and meetings, possessed of common scholarly language (French at this time), pursuing well defined hypotheses, and challenging existing ideas with new data is the reality of scientific life then and now.

These books are a major contribution to intellectual history and should be read widely by historians of Europe. Rudwick is a fine writer and his scholarship is truly impressive. These books are unusually well produced with high quality paper and bindings, an abundance of fine illustrations, superb bibliographies, and my personal favorite, footnotes on the same page as the text. Both Rudwick and the publisher, the University of Chicago Press, are to be congratulated for these superb books.

`Bursting the Limits of Time' & 'Worlds Before Adam' by Martin J. S. Rudwick

In 1793 savant Jean-Andre de Luc stated "I do not believe I should be accused of longueur, by those who recognize that I am here tracing - from its monuments - the fundamental basis of the ancient history of Men, since it concerns their habitation". Author Martin Rudwick comments that "after a good start [de Luc] soon relapsed into his customary verbosity". In fairness after these 708 and 614 page tomes, Rudwick is in no position to thus accuse anyone. De Luc went on to discuss erratic boulders perched high on hills and across plains; lakes acting as natural `chronometers' as they had not yet been silted up by incoming sediment; and subterranean caverns which opened to contain the water required to reduce sea level at various geological times; and so on.

Books like these are rare. For those who want an escape from professional work, family, politics, or the stock exchange these are the ticket. An escape to the intellectual world of 1789 - 1823 and 1820 - 1845 respectively. Absorbed in the historical geological debate with the `savants' of the day we can feel, with the benefit of hindsight, either how hopelessly wrong or spectacularly correct the intellectual speculation can be about honest observations.

These are not books to be read rapidly like a novel. They are an escape to ponder 10 - 15 pages at a time whenever possible, hoping never to come to the end. They allow the reader to live the discovery of geology. We can wonder how and why the author devoted so much time to produce the two tomes. But it was not in vain. Often scientists who achieve breakthroughs personally engender a school of acolytes who develop the new field further.The reason is that learning from a master shows how a discovery was made not just what the discovery was. Perhaps Rudwick's books do this for geology - we understand how the field developed not just the bare results.

This book is heavy going, including it being physically too heavy to hold up! (You have to rest if on something while you read it.) But it is very well written and the story it tells, of the development of the field of geology at the end of the 18th century and the early 19th century is just fascinating. It takes a while to get through, but I found it very stimulating. Lots of relevant illustrations and chapter recaps make sure you really understood what the author was saying. I loved it.

The book is the first volume of a two-volume set, the other being "Worlds Before Adam" which I am reviewing separately.